​The Role of Consciousness in 21st Century Spirituality
 
Consciousness, evolutionary religion, 21st century spirituality
The evolutionary spirituality model rests on the belief that human consciousness evolves, slowly and over long periods of time. That evolution of consciousness includes a slow expansion of the human species’ capacity to sense or intuit the presence of the spiritual dimension of reality, including a slowly expanding awareness of moral goodness and meaning. As such, the evolution of consciousness functions as the basis for the emergence and evolution of religion in its many manifestations.
 
The role of consciousness as the foundation of spirituality and religion becomes more prominent in our contemporary post-Axial culture, where a 21st century sensibility, which includes recognition of the historically and culturally constructed elements of religion, has led to a gradual loss of confidence in the notion that religion originates in a discrete act of top-down divine revelation. This in turn leads to a loss of confidence in the sacred texts, doctrines, and other institutional elements of traditional religion. Lacking faith in the old texts and the doctrines that flow from them, what are we left with as the basis for faith? Simply, consciousness.
 
By letting go of our attachment to the old texts, doctrines, and religious authority structures, we open up the possibility of seeing the remarkable nature of consciousness, which is always right there in front of us as the source of all awareness and the basis for the human capacity to sense that there is a “Something More” to reality than just matter, energy, space, and time. Through consciousness we are able to directly access, however dimly, the presence of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos, including the sense of moral goodness and meaning that are inherent aspects of that spiritual dimension.
 
 
 
Unfortunately, we tend to take consciousness for granted, since it is, in one sense, quite “ordinary,” functioning as the always present basis for the mundane tasks of everyday sensory experience: seeing a rock, tasting an apple, hearing chirping birds, smelling a smoking fire, feeling the sun’s heat. Indeed, the full extent of human waking and dreaming experiences are possible only through our consciousness. As something (exactly what is a bit of a mystery) which is present with us all the time, we take it for granted rather than recognizing that it is utterly extraordinary and the necessary foundation for our capacity for spirituality.
 
More specifically, we suggest here that there are two primary ways in which consciousness functions as the foundation of religion:
1. Consciousness disproves materialism/physicalism, and hence opens up the possibility of a spiritual perspective even for those who no longer find traditional faith to be credible
2. Consciousness is the faculty through which humans have intuitive access to awareness of the transcendental realm of meaning and value – or, in other words, awareness of Spirit
 
Consciousness disproves materialism
Twentieth century thought was dominated by the uncritical acceptance of reductive materialism which naively claimed that all of reality could be explained by and reduced to a material component. In its extreme form materialists simply denied that consciousness existed (which is a rather peculiar assertion, given that it would seem to be the case that any assertion by a human is an act of consciousness, even the assertion that denies the existence of consciousness). More typically, however, consciousness was seen as nothing more than an emergent property of electro-chemical activity in the brain. From this point of view consciousness wasn’t anything special: it’s just what you get when neurons reach a certain level of complexity, as they do in the human brain.
 
But this position has been seriously challenged in both scientific and philosophical circles, as exemplified by what David Chalmers coined the “hard problem” of consciousness. Chalmers refers to the ongoing task of correlating conscious activity with brain events as the “soft problem” of consciousness. It’s a problem, in the sense that we’re still working on developing a full understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), but it’s a “soft” problem in the sense that, in theory at least, it would seem to be the case that given sufficiently sophisticated scanning and similar medical devices, and given sufficient time to continue the research, there is good reason to believe that we will eventually be able to comprehensively understand the correlation between specific acts of consciousness and specific physical events in the brain.
 
 And yet, no matter how accurately and comprehensively we map out the NCC, we still have not explained consciousness itself. Establishing that something happens in the brain, even at the precise moment that a specific conscious event occurs, demonstrates a correlation, but it does not in any way explain what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness is so radically different than the material substance that we observe in the brain that, as Chalmers suggests, bridging the gap between brain event and consciousness event may be an impossible task, and hence the “hard problem,” in the sense of a problem that might never be solved. Put differently, the actual nature of consciousness is an experience of what it is like to be a knowing subject. We might be able to identify what’s happening in a brain when that conscious experience occurs, but in doing so we are not in any way describing the actual subjective experience itself. We are not experiencing or in even a remote way providing insight into the nature of what it is like to have that experience. This again illustrates the peculiar character of consciousness, in that not only is it the case that we at present cannot describe in scientific terms what it is like to have a conscious experience, it would seem to be the case that the very question of describing what it is like to have a conscious experience is nonsensical. Objective realities – including activity in the brain – can be described, explained, measured, etc. by an outside observer. But the actual experience of consciousness cannot be described: it can only be experienced. Paradoxically, the one thing which we know most immediately and intimately is the one thing that completely eludes scientific explanation.
 
In a certain sense, this awareness or consciousness that we all experience may seem rather mundane, precisely because of its commonness and universality. But to view consciousness as such would be an enormous mistake. When we step back and look at consciousness, we find something quite remarkable and mysterious. Consciousness, in a sense, offers us immediate empirically grounded evidence of the existence of something that is not material. Consciousness demonstrates that there is indeed “something more” than the material realm of matter and form. Consciousness demonstrates that, in this universe of such unimaginably immense spatial and temporal vastness, there is something else, and quite remarkably, that something else is part of us, perhaps even the essence of what we are. So this thing that we take for granted as we experience it day after day, moment after moment, is actually something rare, precious, and mysterious.
 
What all of this suggests is that consciousness provides a gateway to the recognition that there really is a “Something More,” beyond the deterministic realm of material reality described by science. Consciousness provides confirmation that, independent of sacred text or church doctrine, there is good reason to believe that, in a broad sense, there is a “spiritual” element to reality.
 
Consciousness provides access to the Transcendent realm of meaning and value
But consciousness provides a basis for a post-traditional spirituality in another important way: besides confirming that there is a non-physical dimension to the Cosmos, consciousness provides us with access to the nature of that spiritual reality. It is only through consciousness that humans have the capacity for awareness of various sorts of sensory experience: sights, sounds, tactile sensations, etc. But consciousness is not limited to awareness of sensory experiences. In at least one species, the human, consciousness has evolved to the point where an awareness of intangibles, or content that is not the immediate product of some sort of sensory stimulation, has become possible. Through consciousness, for example, we have an awareness of abstract concepts such as time, space, number, and other universals.
 
However, most significantly, human consciousness provides us with the capacity to gain access to awareness of supersensory spiritual qualities, such as value (moral goodness, love, empathy, justice, fairness) and meaning. As part of everyday experience, we tend to take this for granted, but here we begin to see the remarkable and unique quality of consciousness as that which allows the human species to access awareness of something that has no external, tangible, physical reality. Through consciousness, we have the capacity to intuit the presence of what, in traditional Western terms, constitutes transcendent qualities such as goodness, truth, and beauty. In the Western tradition, we see this in Plato’s forms; in Chinese thought, we see it in awareness of the indescribable but nonetheless completely real and utterly foundational Dao.
 
Of course, different religious traditions have widely varying beliefs about the specific content of this spiritual awareness, but one could argue that such differences are to be expected when one considers the epistemological challenge of a small, young species attempting to understand and articulate something of this nature. Indeed, the Perennial Philosophy school (represented by the likes of Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and Frithjof Schuon) posits that there is an underlying unity of what might be called intuited spiritual awareness, which only becomes diversified when humans attempt to articulate its content through specific propositional statements.
 
And so….
All of which brings us back to our initial concern: what does consciousness have to do with how we think about religion in the 21st century?
 
To the extent that consciousness both involves a sense of self and is the faculty which allows the self to access concepts of meaning and value, the connection with religion is obvious and always has been:
The specific mode of consciousness that has evolved in the human species (and perhaps elsewhere, but that’s for consideration at another time) is one that provides access to what can reasonably be designated as the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos, in the sense that human consciousness entails an intuitive awareness of, or sense that, we are in a Cosmos in which there exist, as fundamental properties, value and meaning, which are not inherently perceivable through a strictly materialist lens. There is indeed Something More than matter and energy. Religion (in its many expressions) can be seen as the human effort to make sense of and to more precisely articulate the nature of that consciously apprehended but still dim sense of Something More in which value and meaning originate.
 
Hence, with reference to our consideration of how to think about religion in the 21st century, consciousness is the starting point. Setting aside the scriptures which are no longer accepted as the supernaturally revealed word of God, setting aside the doctrines and dogma which are no longer accepted as infallible and unquestioned affirmations that derive from those texts, and setting aside the privileged status of religious authority structures which derive their power from those texts and doctrines, we are still left with a foundation for a spiritual view of reality, and that foundation is consciousness. In fact, one might say that consciousness, when fully recognized as the mysterious and sublime reality that it is, provides a much firmer foundation for a 21st century religious perspective than do sacred texts and church doctrines, in that consciousness is something we know in an immediate and irrefutable sense, whereas sacred texts and doctrines require faith in a variety of ways. In simple and stark terms, consciousness is the 21st century starting point for a spiritual view of reality.

In our previous post, we observed that expansion of our sense of moral responsibility beyond the human realm is found not only in the evolving 21st century spirituality, but also in some expressions of past religious and philosophical traditions. Of particular note is the Neo-Confucian tradition, which unfortunately is often overlooked in accounts of the world’s major spiritual and philosophical traditions.
 
Neo-Confucianism took the moral philosophy of Confucius (who avoided metaphysical and religious speculation) and gave it a cosmic scope, asserting that human ethical behavior constitutes an extension of moral quality (particularly ren) into the Universe (or in Confucian terms, into Heaven, Earth, and Humanity).
 
This extension of moral responsibility beyond the human is intimately related to a corollary assertion of the inter-connectedness of all realms of the Cosmos. Humans do not exist as isolated beings, but rather as a part of a Cosmos of inter-connected entities of varying degrees of consciousness and moral awareness.
 
This sense of the human connection to a larger reality is beautifully described by the 11th century Neo-Confucian Zhang Zai (Chang Tsai) in the beginning of his classic work, The Western Inscription:
 
Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.
Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature.
All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.
 
Carrying this sense of inter-connected reality to its logical moral conclusion that, as part of a larger reality, we have moral empathy for and responsibilities that extend to that larger reality of which we are a part, is Wang Yangming’s (15th to 16th c.) touching description of the enlightened sage as one who feels moral empathy for humans, non-human living beings, and even inanimate objects:
 
When he observes the pitiful cries and frightened appearance of birds and animals about to be slaughtered, he cannot help feeling an inability to bear their suffering. This shows that his humanity forms one body with birds and animals.
It may be objected that birds and animals are sentient beings as he is. But when he sees plants broken and destroyed, he cannot help a feeling of pity. This shows that his humanity forms one body with plants.
It may be said that plants are living things as he is. Yet even when he sees tiles and stones shattered and crushed, he cannot help a feeling of regret. This shows that his humanity forms one body with tiles and stones…..
 
Everything from ruler, minister, husband, wife, and friends to mountains, rivers, spiritual beings, birds, animals, and plants should be truly loved in order to realize my humanity that forms one body with them. 
 
(translations by Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy)
 
Contemporary cosmology, evolutionary theory, the emerging field of Big History, and even quantum theory all assert that humans are not isolated entities but rather part of a larger interconnected whole, and from this insight comes a sense of moral responsibility that expands beyond the human to all sentient beings and even the entire Universe. As this expanded sense of moral responsibility continues to develop in the 21st century and beyond, we can look back to Zhang Zai, Wang Yangming, and others in the Neo-Confucian tradition as an important historical source of this sense of cosmic ethical responsibility.